I work with several developers that come from less object oriented background like (VB6, VBA) and are mostly self-taught. As part of moving away from those technologies we recently we started having weekly workshops to go over the features of C#.NET and OO practices and design principles.

After a couple of weeks of basic introduction I noticed that they had a lot of problems implementing even basic code. For instance it took probably 15 minutes to implement a Stack.push() and a full hour to implement a simple Stack fully. These developers were trying to do things like passing top index as a parameter to the method, not creating an private array, using variables out of scope. But most of all not going through the "design (dia/mono)log" (I need something to do X, so maybe I'll make an array, or put it here).

I am a little confused because they are smart people and are able to produce functional code in their traditional environments.

I'm curious if anybody else has encountered a similar thing and if there are any particular resources, exercises, books, ideas that would be helpful in this circumstance.